REVIEW ESSAY

H. ASIDEI DE’AR‘A AND H. ASIDEI DEKOKHVAYA’: TWO

TRENDS IN MODERN JEWISH HISTORIOGRAPHY

by

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

Rachel Elior. The Mystical Origins of Hasidism. Oxford: Littman Library ofJewish Civilization, 2006. 258 pp.

Mor Altshuler. The Messianic Secret of Hasidism. Leiden: Brill, 2006. xii, 440 pp.

Jan Doktór. Pozcątki Chasydyzmu Polskiego. Wrocław: Wydawnictwo Universy-tetu Wrocławskiego, 2004. 311 pp.

Zeev Gries. The Book in the Jewish World, 1700–1900. Oxford: Littman Libraryof Jewish Civilization, 2007. 251 pp.

Igor Turov. Rannii hasidizm: istoriia, verouchenie, kontakty so slavianskimokruzheniem. Kiev: Dukh i Litera, 2003. 264 pp.

Glenn Dynner. Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. 384 pp.

Marcin Wodziński. Haskalah and Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland: A Historyof Conflict. Trans. Sarah Cozens. Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization,2005. 335 pp.

Ilia Lurie. ‘Edah u-medinah: h.asidut h.abad ba-’imperya ha-rusit 588–643.Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2006. 145 pp.

This paper was written in the fall of 2007 at the Institute for Advanced Studies (IAS) at HebrewUniversity in Jerusalem. I thank my colleagues from the IAS Research Group on Hasidism for theircomments, which helped me to improve this essay considerably.

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David Assaf. Ne’eh.az ba-sevakh: pirkei mashber u-mevukhah be-toldotha-h. asidut. Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar le-Toldot Yisrael, 2006. 378 pp.

Gershon Hundert, one of the leading scholars of Eastern European Jewry,has portrayed Hasidism as “one of many movements of religious enthusiasmthat arose in the eighteenth century.”1 Though most scholars today agree withthis description, they diverge regarding the goals of the movement, the causesof its emergence and spread, and its impact on Eastern European Jewry. SimonDubnow, the father-founder of modern Eastern European Jewish historiography,considered Hasidism to be a response to the seventeenth-century communalcrisis. He portrayed Hasidism as a spiritual movement of ordinary Jews whorebelled against the stringencies of rabbinic Judaism and sought spiritual accom-modation from charismatic yet uneducated leaders.2 Benzion Dinur saw Hasidismas a popular revolution against the corrupt power of the kahal, the umbrella self-governing organization of Polish Jewry.3 Gershom Scholem maintained that it wasthe popularization of Kabbalah that was responsible for the phenomenal success ofHasidism, its rapid spread, and the mass following of the zaddikim, the hasidicmasters.4 By the end of the late twentieth century, most scholars agreed that Hasid-ism was a popular movement triggered by the economic breakdown of PolishJewry, directed against the legal authorities, and led by mystically orientedleaders with no significant rabbinic pedigree or deep knowledge of traditionalJewish sources.

However, in the 1990s, the situation radically changed as Moshe Rosmandiscovered a number of key primary sources in the archive of the Czartoryskifamily in Kraków and proved that the legendary founder of Hasidism known asthe Ba’al Shem Tov (Israel ben Eliezer, ca. 1699–1760) was not a semiliterate itin-erant preacher but a practicing kabbalist hired by the kahal in Międzybóż, one ofthe wealthiest and most prosperous communities in southeastern Poland. The localkahal supported him on a permanent basis, made itself responsible for his taxes,paid his rent, and sponsored his two disciples.5 One of the main implications ofRosman’s analysis is that in order to analyze the character and history of the

1. Gershon David Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogyof Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 160.

2. Simon Dubnow, Toldot ha-h.asidut (Tel-Aviv, 1930–32); see also idem, “The Beginnings:The Baal Shem Tov (Besht) and the Center in Podolia” and “The Maggid of Miedzyrzecz, His Associ-ates, and the Center in Volhynia (1760–1772),” in Gershon David Hundert, Essential Papers on Hasid-ism: Origins to Present (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 58–85.

3. Benzion Dinur, Be-mifneh ha-dorot: meh.karim ve-’iyunim be-reshitam shel ha-z.manim ha-h.adashim be-toldot yisra’el (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1955), 83–227; see the English version, “TheOrigins of Hasidism and its Social and Messianic Foundations,” in Hundert, Essential Papers onHasidism, 86–208.

4. Gershom Scholem, Devarim be-go: pirkei morashah u-teh. iyah (Tel-Aviv: Am over, 1975),287–324.

5. Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov (Berkeley:California University Press, 1996), esp. 63–82, 173–86. On Rosman’s methodological innovations, seehis How Jewish Is Jewish History (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007).

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hasidic movement, one has to go grassroots. Before investigating “what Hasidismthought,” one has to look at “what Hasidism was,” employing the methods of cul-tural and social history rather than the history of ideas. Rosman’s analysis alsodemonstrated that the discovery of new sources, above all in Polish and Ukrainianarchives and in languages other than Hebrew and Yiddish, is an essential elementin rewriting the history of the hasidic movement.

But even before the mid-1990s, scholars of Hasidism started to drift from thehistory of ideas to social history as they saw that ideologically based grand histori-cal narratives were insufficient to explain the entirety of the movement. Previousscholarship failed to answer how the old-style pietists, dubbed “lowercase”hasidim, managed to transform themselves into anti-ascetic “uppercase”Hasidim and move from the kabbalistic elitist kloyz into a communal andlargely accessible bet midrash. Nor could they explain the rapid conquest byhasidim of what today is Moldova, Ukraine, Belorussia, Lithuania, and Polandwithin a twenty-five-year span. These and similar questions generated opposingtrends among historians of Hasidism. The representatives of one trend claimthat the answers can be found in internal Hebrew and Yiddish sources and thatthe teachings of hasidic masters are more significant than anything else. The repre-sentatives of the other trend resort, among other things, to external sources inSlavic languages and emphasize the key role of new social networks and insti-tutions created by hasidim. These two trends can conveniently be classified asH. asidei dekokhvaya’ (star-struck Hasidim) and H. asidei de’ar‘a (earth-boundHasidim), albeit there are no hasidic groups with such names and the Aramaicquasi-Zoharic wordings are my invention.

As in any dichotomy, the division of scholars of Hasidism into two trends,groups, or camps is artificial, and the borders between them are informal andblurred. Sometimes the disputes within each of the groups have more significantramifications than those between the opposite groups. And some scholars whostudy Hasidim through the lens of anthropology or folklore do not fit into the his-toriographic framework with its characteristic trends discussed here. Furthermore,as this essay is a review essay, the limitations of the genre do not allow me toidentify and discuss each and every representative of what I call H. asideide’ar‘a and H. asidei dekokhvaya’. Nor am I trying to portray the most typical orthe most representative figures of the two trends, as the choice of books toreview depended first and foremost on the time of publication. My task is moremodest: to point to certain tendencies that have shaped the field in Jewish histor-iography dealing with Hasidism. I seek to prove that my classification helps sys-tematize key trends in the study of Hasidism and suggest a path for futureproductive research.

“CONTEXTUAL” AND “GHETTOIZED” HISTORIOGRAPHY

By the metaphor H. asidei de’ar‘a, “earth-bound Hasidim,” I mean an infor-mal grouping of Jewish scholars who seek to integrate the history of the hasidicmovement into a larger sociocultural and socioeconomic Eastern Europeancontext. As Hundert has demonstrated, context is the key word in the research

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methodology of those whom I consider H. asidei de’ar‘a.6 Most of them agree with

Moshe Rosman’s statement that “[o]nly by bringing the Besht down to earth will itbe possible to evaluate his way in the service of heaven.”7 Like Rosman, H. asideide’ar‘a claim that the “earthly” context underlies much of what hasidic masterssaw as their new way in the service of heaven.

H. asidei de’ar‘a understand by “earthly” context a socioeconomic, cultural,demographic, comparative religious, and psychological environment envelopingeighteenth-century Jewish pietistic revivalism. They seem to follow Zeev Gries,who once observed that “[t]he student of religious beliefs or doctrines cannotdivorce himself from investigation of the social context where they foundexpression, nor can he ignore the general and local historical circumstancesunder which they were created.”8 For H. asidei de’ar‘a, as I will demonstrate indue course, contextualization is a search into the horizontal and synchronic;they establish direct and complex links between the rise of Hasidism and parallelprocesses taking place among Polish Jews, as well as among their non-Jewishneighbors, Poles or Russians. H. asidei de’ar‘a are confident that it is not feasibleto reconstruct this context without the knowledge of languages, in this case, Polishand Russian, if not the Ukrainian or Lithuanian language. H. asidei de’ar‘a con-sider the representatives of early modern Jewish pietism as human beings offlesh and blood who either paid or did not pay taxes, enjoyed the support of thekahal or the upper-class Jewish bourgeoisie or were persecuted and despised bythem, interacted with Polish or Russian authorities, established organizedgroups of followers or kept a low profile, and brought to press or avoided publiciz-ing their homiletic works. H. asidei de’ar‘a, the earth-bound scholars of the move-ment, place hasidic masters—zaddikim—in an immediate Polish Jewish urbancontext, be it Międzybóż, Warsaw, Lubavich, or Berdiczów, in which, theyclaim, Hasidism as a movement makes sense. H. asidei de’ar‘a practice cautionwhen dealing with primary sources. They are particularly skeptical about hagio-graphies, which they think strain much of the life of the hasidic master portrayedin books through the filter of editors, publishers, and printers.

By yet another metaphor, H. asidei dekokhvaya’, “star-struck Hasidim,”I refer to a very different informal grouping of scholars who study Hasidism asa new stage in the development of Jewish mysticism and as a groundbreakingsocial phenomenon. Whereas H. asidei de’ar‘a underscore the context and thedynamics of the movement within this context, H. asidei dekokhvaya’ emphasizeits place within the Jewish tradition. At certain stages of research—for example,when Gershom Scholem argued against the scornful treatment of Kabbalah inJewishWissenschaft—this angle has proved its advantages.9 H. asidei dekokhvaya’

6. See the chapter “Contexts of Hasidism,” in Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, 160–85.7. Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 94.8. Zeev Gries, “Hasidism: The Present State of Research and Some Desirable Priorities,”

Numen 34, no. 1 (1987): 97–108; 34, no. 2 (1987): 179–213.9. For Scholem’s critique of theWissenschaft des Judentums school, see his “Mi-tokh hirhurim

‘al h.okhmat yisra’el,” in H. okhmat yisra’el: hebetim historiyim u-filosofiyim, ed. Paul Mendes-Flohr(Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1979), 153–68.

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view the object of their research diachronically; they seek to integrate it into grandhistorical narratives such as Jewish messianism.H. asidei dekokhvaya’ claim that inorder to study Hasidism, one needs to engage an entire corpus of Jewish mysticaltexts written over the span of five or seven centuries. H. asidei dekokhvaya’ main-tain that this corpus of mystical texts is indispensable for making sense of BeshtianHasidism. Concerned about the diachrony, they emphasize the continuity amongthe twelfth-century German pietists (H. asidei Ashkenaz), the Abulafian ecstaticKabbalah, the late thirteenth-century Zohar, the sixteenth-century Lurianicliturgy, and the homiletic writings of the eighteenth-century Polish religious reviv-alists. They analyze in great depth the ways in which Beshtian Hasidism devel-oped such notions as devekut (cleaving to God), z.adik (righteous one),hafshatat ha-gashmiyut (liberating oneself from corporeality), niz.oz.ot (divinesparks), tikkun (fixing or improvement), yih.udim (unifications), and other key kab-balistic notions. For them, Hasidism is first and foremost a new system of ideasstemming from Kabbalah.

Placing Hasidism within Judaic mystical tradition allows H. asidei dekokh-vaya’, star-struck Hasidim, to trace parallels between what they term the theologyof the Besht and the mysticism of Abraham Abulafia, Isaac Luria, or Yosef Karo.To critically reconstruct a historical picture of the Besht, H. asidei dekokhvaya’remove him from his immediate sociohistorical context and place him firmlywithin the context of an abstraction named “Jewish mysticism,” wherein hetakes his place among the other great “Jewish mystics” of the previous centuries.The Besht becomes paradigmatic as a reincarnation of the Jewish mystical para-digm. Yet his leadership makes him different. H. asidei dekokhvaya’, most promi-nently Immanuel Etkes, use the self-assessment of the Besht from his “HolyEpistle” (‘Iggeret ha-kodesh) as proof that he was a leader of the Jewishpeople.10 Quite remarkably, H. asidei dekokhvaya’ prefer to prove Beshtian leader-ship through the celestial ascent of his soul and his cleaving to God, yih.udim anddevekut, rather than through his earthly social skills. Because some scholars ulti-mately divest the Besht and other hasidic masters of their earthly materialism,make them into celestial beings, and enable them to talk over the barriers of cen-turies, I address these scholars as H. asidei dekokhvaya’.

The following is an attempt to look through recent books on Hasidism usingthe proposed classification and to find out what modern scholars of Hasidism canteach us.

THE LURE AND PERIL OF THE STAR-STRUCK HASIDIM

In her volume The Mystical Origins of Hasidism, Rachel Elior presentsHasidism as a theological phenomenon stemming from “individual mysticalexperience to a comprehensive doctrine” (10). Lurianic Kabbalah serves as anoverarching theme for Elior’s story. Early eighteenth-century hasidim studiedthe ideas and imitated the behavior of the Safed circle of Isaac Luria. They

10. See the chapter “A Leader of the Jewish People” in Immanuel Etkes, The Besht: Magician,Mystic, and Leader (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2005), 77–112.

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revived the kabbalistic myth, in particular the concept of the divine origins of theHoly Tongue and Hebrew letters. Elior maintains that the Ba’al Shem Tov inher-ited the kabbalistic tradition and revolutionized it by blurring the distinctionbetween the light of the letters and human language, the sacred and the profane,sanity and madness, the higher world and this world, and life and death (67).Hasidim of the Besht developed his ideas, based on Lurianic concepts, andcreated a set of doctrines that had important social ramifications, above all thedoctrine of the zaddik, a charismatic authority endowed with divine grace.Elior considers Hasidism in an ideational context reduced to sabbateans,Frankists, and, in the late eighteenth century, mitnagdic resistance to Hasidism.Elior concludes her study with a lengthy comparison of Jacob Frank and theBesht, who were both charismatic mystics, kabbalists, and paradoxical thinkersand leaders of two opposing movements “revolutionary on their socio-religiouscharacter.” The last chapter lays out various trends in the study of Hasidism andemphasizes the diversity of trends and approaches among modern scholars ofthe movement.

Written by a scholar who has achieved recognition as an expert in Kab-balah and Jewish mysticism and whom I consider one of the most importantamong H. asidei dekokhvaya’, Elior’s book leaves a puzzling impression. It isan erudite volume that says nothing new. The conceptualization of Hasidismas a stage in the development of Lurianic Kabbalah dates back to GershomScholem; its mystical aspect to Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, Joseph Weiss, andAbraham Joshua Heschel; the mitnagdic opposition to Mordecai Wilensky;and the revolutionary character of the hasidic movement to Benzion Dinurand Raphael Mahler. Elior uses a rather outdated concept of the movementto cement her narrative. She leaves aside theories, ideas, insights, and dataamassed by scholars who have long departed from the thinking patterns ofDinur or Scholem. Although Elior makes an attempt to create a context forHasidism, her context is mainly ideological: A highly complex, murky, andunderresearched interaction between, for example, sabbateans and Hasidim ispresented merely as a dispute between theologians, who think and speak philo-sophical concepts and debate over doctrines. Following the approach of H. asideidekokhvaya’, Elior presents to us what Hasidim could have thought rather thanwho Hasidim were or could have been. This focus on the intellectual content ofhasidic ideology prevents the author from testing new and risky but rewardingapproaches to Hasidism. This is even more regrettable because the depiction ofHasidim as systematic thinkers with their own clear-cut doctrine, as a JewishPolish version of the Heidelberg or Jena Romantics, is highly problematic. Inorder to discuss the intellectual structure of hasidic ideology or theologybased on the model of contemporary European thought, it is necessary toprove first that hasidic thinkers aspired to think within the canons of Europeantheology.

Elior obliquely refers to research into the social aspects of the hasidicmovement, yet she could have more seriously engaged the social context.Elior keeps repeating that the movement originated in Podolia and latermoved to Volhynia. But what was the Podolian specificity of the movement?

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Could Hasidism have emerged in Moravia, Altona, or in the midst of pietisticgroups in northern Italy? Were Elior to reconstruct the sociocultural circum-stances of the Besht—including the spread of Jewish shamans and popularKabbalah—perhaps she would be able to explain why Hasidism sprang up ineastern Poland instead of in any of the dozens of contemporary mysticalgroups throughout Central and Southern Europe. Indeed, some Polish realitiesare mentioned in the book. Elior presents to the reader close associates ofthe Besht who were in Brody, Rowno, Szarogród, Bracław, Horodenka, Kuty,and Kosów. Elior mentions that it was a fragmented group, but she does notelucidate how and when its members came together—if they ever did so as acoherent group.

After reading Elior’s book, one may begin to think that the BeshtianHasidim agreed to request from their communities a sabbatical year to rescindtheir communal and family obligations and get together with the Besht in Międ-zybóż to talk Kabbalah, practice mystical unifications, and pray from the Lurianicprayer book. Indeed, we learn nothing about how, when, and for how long theystayed together. One should take into consideration some basics of the EasternEuropean environment of that time: for example, that the road conditions inEastern Europe were awful, that any travel was a dangerous and painstaking enter-prise, and that the distance between the towns where the Beshtian Hasidim residedwas hundreds and hundreds of miles. Should H. asidei dekokhvaya’ such as Eliorengage this commonsensical Polish context, they would realize that hasidicideas did not travel from place to place without hindrance and that the Beshtlived in a very different informational milieu. Anybody who engages the historyof ideas in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe should keep in mind that theBesht was not on the Internet 24/6 discussing his mystical insights into Torahby instant message with his hasidim. Not could the Besht regularly visit hisalleged disciples scattered over a territory as big as France.

Elior’s book advances a number of formidable ideas that are left unproven.For example, a chapter dedicated to groundbreaking late eighteenth-centurysocial upheavals is titled “Hasidic Revolution” without providing criteria fordetermining Hasidism’s revolutionary character. Elior portrays the Besht as anecstatic mystic, ba’al shem, a powerful communicator, a spiritual innovator,and an inspiring leader, citing Rosman to support her last claim (73). ButRosman does not present the Besht as a leader. Though one can easilyimagine the Besht as a spiritual innovator, there is no evidence that he was oreven attempted to be a leader.11 Perhaps a generation or two later, he startedto be seen as one. However, there is absolutely no evidence that in the 1740s–1760s he was one. In his time, there were ba’alei shem as reputed as he was;pietists as mystically minded as he was; and kabbalists much more systematicthan he was. If by innovator, one implies his anti-ascetic stance on pietism,this makes him into a spiritual innovator but hardly a revolutionary leader ofthe hasidic movement, as Elior is trying to define him. The Besht was not the

11. Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 154, 167, 208–209.

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head of the yeshiva; he did not have and did not try to create a mass following;he did not rebel against the authorities; and he was not an eighteenth-centuryLeon Trotsky of Podolia. The claim of his leadership is wishful thinking, asungrounded in historical reality as the mitnagdic critique of Hasidism. Theopponents of Hasidism in Grodno, Minsk, Brody, and Vilna proclaimed in the1770s that malicious Hasidim dared to change Judaism and therefore shouldnot be tolerated. Elior seems to argue that Hasidim revolutionized Judaism,and this was just wonderful.

If the comparative context calls into question Elior’s portrayal of Hasidism,how can one explain the reason hasidic masters chose to call the Besht theirteacher? I strongly believe that it is better to acknowledge that scholars cannotanswer certain questions than to invent an unproven narrative based on an over-arching kabbalistic or mystical discourse that seems to explain everything.Despite Ada Rapoport-Albert’s serious attempts to suggest an answer, the questionof why prominent Central and Eastern European mystics decided to claim theBesht as their teacher is still an unresolved problem.12 We do not have sufficientcontemporary external and internal evidence to make bold statements.

I also have some questions about Elior’s definitions of the movement. “[W]hat caused him to become the founder of Hasidism?” asks Elior about the Besht.Indeed, her assumption is that the Besht knew that he was the founder and wantedto become the founder, and the best thing that a student of Hasidism can do is toidentify the causes that allowed the Besht to become the founder. Contemporaryprimary sources provide no support for this assumption. And one can never betoo cautious when dealing with the late nineteenth-century hasidic hagiographiescreated specifically to portray the Besht as the founder of Hasidism. Elior’s por-trayal of the Besht would be much more accurate and nuanced if she had followedthe advise of Gries to conduct “the troublesome investigation of all those anon-ymous agents of culture whose contributions are of inestimable value—such asauthors, copyists, editors (MalBihaD), and printers.”13

Among other things, Elior’s volume states that the Besht achieved fame as astoryteller. Elior does not elucidate how we know that. If the basis for this claim isthe collection of stories, such as In Praise of the Ba’al Shem Tov (1814–15), or theimage of the Besht in the hasidic lore, it would suffice to elucidate this point bysaying that the author deals with the Besht’s later image, not with the real Beshtin his own sociocultural context. At least contemporary documents tell usnothing about his being a storyteller, let alone famous. Let us assume for asecond that the Besht was a gifted storyteller. Why, then, did it take his followerstwenty to thirty years after his death to say this out loud? What could have been sodangerous in spreading the Besht’s fame as a storyteller in his lifetime? As his con-temporary sources—and even late eighteenth-century sources—are reticent in this

12. See Ada Rapoport-Albert, “Hasidism after 1772: Structural Continuity and Change,” inHasidism Reappraised, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1996), 76–140.

13. Zeev Gries, “Hasidism: The Present State of Research and Some Desirable Priorities,”Numen 34, no. 1 (1987): 100.

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regard, the attempt of the nineteenth-century hasidic historiography to present theBesht as a talented storyteller should be disregarded. That the book of stories aboutthe Besht has nicely shaped tales does not imply that the Besht himself was a story-teller. Likewise, Elior’s claim that “the Besht circle was in awe of him” hangs inthe air. One should remember that this “awe” made it into press sixty years afterthe death of the Besht, when the hasidic movement was in full sway and Hasidimcomposed stories of their holy history. Generally, H. asidei dekokhvaya’, RachelElior among them, should revisit their conceptual framework, in which sourcescoexist in a nontemporal fashion and freely talk to one another, as ideas in the Pla-tonic world of forms.

Accurate context has not inspired H. asidei dekokhvaya’, yet their own ideashave. In one of his essays on the history of Eastern European mysticism, GershomScholem advanced a productive concept of the “neutralization of the messianicelement” in early Hasidism.14 His influential essay brought about a quarter-century-long discussion of Jewish millenarian expectations and the rise ofeighteenth-century Hasidism. Students of Jewish mysticism agreed that messian-ism performed some role in the rise of Hasidism, yet they also argued that hasidicmasters downplayed messianic imagery—or at least differentiated between mes-sianic expectations, to be enhanced among the faithful, and messianic times, notto be hastened. However, in her intriguing volume The Messianic Secret of Hasid-ism, Mor Altshuler seeks to prove the opposite. Engaged in a productive dialoguewith key H. asidei dekokhvaya’ such as Isaiah Tishby and Gershom Scholem, Alt-shuler privileges Tishby over Scholem regarding the messianic element in Hasid-ism as she undertakes an attempt “to retell the beginning of Hasidism as a story ofa messianic movement.” In her view, the late twentieth-century messianic upliftamong the Chabad adepts was not accidental; it exteriorized chiliastic expectationsthat had been dormant in the bosom of Hasidism. Tracing these expectations, Alt-shuler chose to research the enigmatic figure of Yehiel Mikhel, the maggid ofZolochev (Złoczów). Seeking to create a messianic context for the principal char-acter of the book, Altshuler resorts to the holy epistle of the Ba’al Shem Tov, theletter he wrote to his brother-in-law, Gershon of Kuty (Kutover).

Altshuler uses the methodology of H. asidei dekokhvaya’ yet needs a muchbetter engagement with the ideas of her colleagues. Recently, the holy epistlebecame the focus of a fierce debate among historians of Hasidism.15 Yet even stal-wart opponents such as Immanuel Etkes and Moshe Rosman agreed that the Beshtdifferentiated between himself and the Redeemer in describing his ascent toheaven.16 The holy epistle emphasized the messianic moment, connected it to

14. See Gershom Scholem, “The Neutralization of the Messianic Element in Early Hasidism,”in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: SchockenBooks, 1995), 176–202 (first published in 1970).

15. See the polemical comments by Haviva Pedaya, “‘Iggeret ha-kodesh le-Besht: nusah. ha-tekst u-temunat ha-’olam—meshih. iyut, hitgalut, ’ekstazah ve-shabta’ut,” Z. iyon 70, no. 3 (2005):311–54, and Rosman’s answer to her, ibid. For the versions of the holy epistle and comments question-ing Rosman’s approach, see Etkes, The Besht, 272–88.

16. See Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 99–113; and Etkes, The Besht, 80–87.

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the spread of Beshtian teachings, but did not identify the Besht himself with theMessiah. Its plain meaning seems to be that time and society had not ripenedyet. Therefore, the coming of the Messiah was delayed until the time when Besh-tian teachings could win the hearts and minds of the people. And, as the Beshthimself admitted, it was not up to him to spread his teaching. Altshuler offersan alternative meaning of the Beshtian letter. She argues that the holy epistleemphasized messianism—it did not downplay it. The explicit messianic expec-tations of the Beshtian letter informed the mid-eighteenth-century Zeitgeist,which facilitates Altshuler’s portrayal of Yehiel Mikhel, the preacher of Zolochevand the volume’s main character, in terms of what Moshe Idel called the “messia-nic mystics.”

Yehiel Mikhel (1726–86) was the scion of an aristocratic Galician family,son and grandson of prominent kabbalists. He served as a preacher in Kolki andZolochev, established his own prayer group in Brody, and most likely died inJampol—as Altshuler suggests, excommunicated and embittered. Messianicexpectations were pivotal for the Eastern European pietists in general and forYehiel Mikhel in particular. According to some kabbalistic numerical calculations,the messianic era should have started about 1740; chiliastic expectations werearoused in 1740, suppressed in 1746 (as reflected in the holy epistle), and reawa-kened in 1772 by R. Yehiel Mikhel, whom Altshuler introduces as a disciple of theBesht, a messianic visionary, and the first hasidic zaddik.

The establishment of Yehiel Mikhel’s prayer quorum in 1777 in Brody is acentral episode in his career and the event around which Altshuler constructs hernarrative. Persecuted by the Brody kahal for their schismatic behavior, themembers of Yehiel Mikhel’s group had to operate in secret. At their gatherings,they imitated Safed kabbalists practicing yeh. idot (unifications) before prayerand strove to link their souls to the souls of Israel and all living beings. Duringthe Shavuot night vigil, Yehiel Mikhel performed a tikkun, the fixing of thesouls. When he gave his sermon, his listeners felt that the shekhinah (Divine Pre-sence) spoke through him, revealing God’s glory in public. Isaac of Radvil, YehielMikhel’s son, wrote later that his father “came to repair either himself or his gen-eration, as it is written that the zaddik is called the ‘pillar of the world,’ for theworld rests on the zaddik” (80). Departing from his reflections, Altshulerarrives at the conclusion that Yehiel Mikhel was the first hasidic zaddik and hisgroup of followers, the first hasidic court.

Let us consider Altshuler’s evidence. Isaac of Radvil compares his father toa zaddik; he does not say that his father was a zaddik. His comparison is entirelymetaphorical. He does not imply that Yehiel Mikhel acted as a public figure, hadpilgrims coming regularly to his court, collected the “soul ransom” moneys(pidyonot), prayed for the well-being of his followers, acted as a conduit tounite his disciples to the divine grace, provided spiritual relief for the needy,appointed slaughterers and preachers, gave public sermons, distributed socialrelief moneys, or had a mass following. Of all those conditions characterizingthe operation of a hasidic court, Yehiel Mikhel’s group displayed perhaps one,if any: the unification of the group members around the preacher, who helpedhis colleagues achieve devekut, cleaving to God. And this characteristic does

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not suggest that Yehiel Mikhel was a zaddik. To advance such a claim, one needsto do serious comparative work, placing him, for example, next to the Maggid ofMezhirich (Mięzyrzecz), whose hasidic court preceded Yehiel Mikhel’s. Thecritics of Altushuler’s Hebrew book strongly suggested introducing a comparativeframework to better balance her arguments, yet as the English version demon-strates, Altshuler preferred not to follow the advice. A comparative frameworkwould momentarily show that commitment to preserving secrecy was not charac-teristic of hasidic courts, which were always found in the public realm—moreover,at the very epicenter of this realm. Openness and accessibility is exactly whatmade a court into a court, not secrecy and seclusion.

The encoded practices, secrecy, and seclusion of Yehiel Mikhel’s followerscharacterized the exclusive and elitist mystics—the hasidim—not the newHasidim rallying around their zaddik. There is hardly anything in YehielMikhel’s group similar to the zaddiks’ courts of the later period. Rather than acourt, it was, as Altshuler soundly suggests, an independent prayer assemblywith altered liturgy, an association of kabbalists “whose activities conform to apattern characteristic of earlier groups” (61, 108). This is in full agreement withYehiel Mikhel’s depiction as a zaddik in the traditional meaning of the word: arighteous person among the pious. As he emerges from Altshuler’s study,Yehiel Mikhel stood at the head of a traditional elitist group of Eastern Europeanpietists who were absorbed with the study of Kabbalah. Altshuler offers no evi-dence to suggest that Yehiel Mikhel was a zaddik in the sociocultural or theologi-cal meaning of the word. The evidence she brings is at variance with her ownconclusions, particularly if one considers the treatment of Yehiel Mikhel’sfather, also an old-style hasid, as a zaddik. Furthermore, the links betweenYehiel Mikhel and his followers have nothing to do with the forced conclusionthat the hasidic movement “originated from a circle of messianic kabbalists, ledby a charismatic leader—R. Yehiel Mikhel—and motivated by a clear althoughesoteric vision of corporeal and celestial redemption” (204). The preacher of Zolo-chev would be better served if he were portrayed as a celestial kabbalist in seclu-sion rather than as an earthly group leader of the pious acting in public.

Like Mor Altshuler, Jan Doktór may be said to illustrate some of the keymethodological principles of the H. asidei dekokhvaya’ trend—both productiveand faulty. His Polish-language book The Beginnings of Polish Hasidism is yetanother attempt at the messianic conceptualization of Hasidism. Doktór seeks topresent messianism as the fulcrum of early modern religious developments inEastern Europe. Yet Doktór goes further than Altshuler, clustering under asingle rubric of the messianic movement not only the early hasidic masters butalso the sabbateans of the 1660s, the crypto-sabbateans of the late 1690s, theba’alei shem of the 1720s, the Besht of the 1740s, Jacob Frank and the Frankistsof the 1750s, some Lithuanian rabbinic leaders of the 1760s, and the followers ofthe Besht of the 1770s.

To solidify his conceptualization, Doktór considers early modern Jewishmessianism as a sporadic process. Messianism comes in waves: Each waveraises the movement to its crest and then makes it fade. Doktór traces Hasidismback to the period following the 1648–49 Khmel’nyts’kyi massacres, when new

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ascetic tendencies rapidly spread among Eastern European Jews and informedtheir new pietistic values. Doktór is perfectly aware of the fundamentalworks of modern Jewish scholars differentiating between the lowercase pietistichasidim and the uppercase Beshtian Hasidim, yet he labels them indiscrimi-nately as Hasidim sharing the same set of behavioral patterns and theologicalviews. Contrary to the existing evidence, Doktór advances a united messianicgenealogy in which such crypto-sabbatean figures as Yehuda Hasid, HaimMalakh, and Nehemia Hayun emerge as the older colleagues of the BeshtianHasidim.

In his treatment of crypto-sabbateans and early eighteenth-century pietistic-minded kabbalists, Doktór relies mostly on the eighteenth-century Rabbi JacobEmden and the early twentieth-century researcher David Kahana, who doggedlyfollowed Emden’s identifications.17 Emden labeled as a sabbatean anybody he dis-liked, and he disliked many. His idiosyncratic misanthropy, a disguise for his reli-gious zeal, should have made Doktór question the veracity of some characteristicsthat Emden gave to his contemporaries. Instead, Doktór identifies rabbinic leaders,vagabond preachers, or sedentary kabbalists as sabbateans by association based ona biased source. Although he admits that the Besht was skeptical about Sabbatean-ism, Doktór—exactly as Rachel Elior does—surrounds him with the ba’alei shemand pietists known for their messianic and sabbatean enthusiasm. Thus, Doktórintroduces the messianic framework to characterize every endeavor of theeighteenth-century Hasidim. For example, the pilgrimage of the Besht, Nahmanof Horodenka, and Gershon of Kuty to the Holy Land occurred, as Doktór main-tains, around the chiliastic year of 1740 and had messianic connotations. Criticalremarks of the Besht about some rabbinic teachings also revealed his unabashedmessianic pretensions. After 1747, states Doktór on the basis of unproved dataand misreading of sources, the Besht turned from a skeptical attitude toward mes-sianism to a full embrace of it. In his letter to Gershon of Kuty, maintains Doktór,the Besht presented himself as chosen by Heaven as a messianic messenger—andthis new messianic stance helped the Besht to gather messianic-minded hasidimaround him.

The moment Doktór abandons the path of H. asidei dekokhvaya’ and movesbeyond the ideational, his conceptualization becomes more reliable. Doktóradvances a detailed and well-documented exploration of the pilgrimage ofYehuda Hasid and his crypto-sabbatean brothers from Poland to East CentralEurope to Jerusalem, of the establishment of crypto-sabbatean groups betweenFürth and Żółkiew, of Haim Malakh’s agitation in Europe, and of individualleaders of the crypto-sabbatean movement. He bases his narrative on the oldprinted German pamphlets and diaries of the Halle Institutum Judaicum mission-aries. Testing the ground before launching the missionary campaign, those Chris-tian activists traveled and spoke to various Eastern European Jews about Jewishreligious pursuits, conflicts in the communities, and key religious symbols.Although the Christian missionaries inspired a messianic enthusiasm of their

17. See David Kahana, Toldot ha-mekubalim ha-shabta’yim ve-ha-h.asidim (Odessa, 1913–14).

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own, most of their observations seem valid and shed new light on the developmentof crypto-Sabbateanism. Doktór’s new evidence widens what is known so farabout Yehuda Hasid’s and Haim Malakh’s activities. However, Doktór’s attemptto link crypto-sabbateans to the Besht follow a different methodology and there-fore furnish a fascinating yet entirely groundless conceptualization of the hasidicmovement. Doktór has proven his command of the Eastern European Jewishschismatics.18 But his overall conceptualization of the messianic and sabbateanorigins of Hasidism is entirely derivative, let alone erroneous.

STAR-STRUCK HASIDIM LOOK UPON EARTH

Zeev Gries, who works mostly with the material of H. asidei dekokhvaya’(such as Hebrew and Yiddish published sources), has long realized that the meth-odology of his school does not work. His experiments with new approaches haveturned him into one of the sharpest critics of that trend. His critique is particularlyamazing because he seems comfortable among historians of ideas, works mostlywith internal Jewish sources, and does not have Slavic languages to reconstructsociocultural Eastern European context. To revisit some heavenly H. asidei dekokh-vaya’ premises, Gries turns to the history of Jewish book lore.19 Kabbalistic andhasidic ideas, maintains Gries, come from books and manuscripts with their ownhistories comprising the travails of the manuscript, the intent of the publisher, thestory of a printer and his printing press, the peculiarities of the circulation of abook, the frequency of its printing, and the way it was perceived by readers.The history of kabbalistic works and manuscripts constitutes a pivotal sociocul-tural aspect of Hasidism. Only one chapter of Gries’s volume The Book in theJewish World, 1700–1900 is relevant to my discussion, yet it eloquently speaksto the necessity of taking the history of ideas down to earth by presenting andexploring it as a history of books and printing.

Gries uses the history of book print to challenge Scholem’s conceptualiz-ation of early Hasidism as a reaction to, or a result of, the spread of Kabbalah.Gries reads bibliographies as novels; he shows that kabbalistic books first pub-lished in the sixteenth century—including Sefer ha-Zohar—were not reprinteduntil the second half of the eighteenth century. Neither in the sixteenth nor inthe seventeenth century was there any significant increase in the printing of kab-balistic books. Before the breakthrough developments in Żółkiew in the secondhalf of the eighteenth century, the printing presses responsible for publishing kab-balistic works could be counted on one hand. Also, basic kabbalistic books, as themanuscript collections worldwide show, did not enjoy wide circulation. Nobodypreached the bringing of Kabbalah to the masses in the first half of the eighteenth

18. See Doktór’s publication of Jacob Frank’s writings, Księga słów Pańskich: ezoterycznewyłady Jakuba Franka, 2 vols. (Warsaw: Semper, 1997); and his research into the Frankist movement,Jakub Frank i jego nauka: na tle kryzysu religijnej tradycji osiemnastowiecznego Żydowstwa polskiego(Warsaw: Instytut Filosofii i Socjologii PAN, 1991).

19. See Zeev Gries, Sefer, sofer ve-sipur be-re’shit ha-h.asidut (Tel-Aviv: Ha-kibbuts ha-meyu-khad, 1992).

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century. If the seventeenth century saw an increase in interest, asks Gries, why wasthere no increase in the publishing of kabbalistic works or the copying ofmanuscripts?

Taking the history of the Jewish book as a yardstick, Gries challengesH. asidei dekokhvaya’ who place homilies and homiletic concepts at the centerof hasidic theology. Look at what Hasidim brought to press and reprinted, suggestsGries. Works preaching the practice of kavvanot (intentions), bitul ha-yesh (self-abnegation), or devekut (cleaving to God) were not popular at all, whereas narra-tives on the wonder-working zaddikim enjoyed mass success. If the increasinginterest in Kabbalah was the result of the mid-seventeenth-century sabbateanmovement, and if the spread of Kabbalah in the eighteenth century was a reactionto the rise of the hasidic movement, how can one use kabbalistic theology toaccount for the spread of Hasidism? Gries points to social and communal experi-ence as paving the way for H. asidei de’ar’a exploration and obliquely acknowl-edges that H. asidei dekokhvaya’ have been unable to explain the origins andspread of Hasidism.

Another good example of the attempts of H. asidei dekokhvaya’ to abandontheir celestial dwelling and move elsewhere is the Russian-language volume byIgor Turov, Early Hasidism: History, Theology, Contacts with the Slavic Sur-rounding. Turov wrote the first half of the book as a review of the early stagesof the development of Hasidism, drawing from an impressive amount ofEnglish- and Hebrew-language secondary sources, most of which are not availablein any language in any of the libraries of the former Soviet Union. Turov relegateshis own contribution to the two last chapters of his volume, in which he attempts togive a new spin to Yaffa Eliach’s consistently rejected hypothesis connectingHasidism and eighteenth-century Russian Orthodox sectarians.20 Turov agreeswith modern scholars’ critique of Eliach’s theory, according to which the Beshtinherited the esoteric tradition of the Russian Orthodox schismatics. Nevertheless,he considers the Slavic religious context too important to be disregarded. He doesnot supply the reader with an identification of the parallelism that he tracesbetween the contemporary Russian Orthodox practices and hasidic innovations,yet he seems to suggest an intensive cross-fertilization of Jewish and Slavicculture based on a shared pool of values.

First, he points to the similarities between hasidic groups and RussianOrthodox voluntary brotherhoods, which emerged as a response to the inculcatedCatholicism in eastern Poland populated by the Russian Orthodox. As hasidicgroups rallied around a zaddik and used a grassroots network to preach thehasidic gospel, these Christian brotherhoods rallied around their own communalpatriarchs and went grassroots to preach Russian Orthodoxy to the simple folk.Second, Turov depicts the similarities between Jewish and Christian popularbeliefs as characterized by the centrality of magic and occult. Third, Turovnotices an important liturgical revivalism among the Russian Orthodox,

20. Yaffa Eliach, “The Russian Dissenting Sects and Their Influence on Israel Baal Shem Tov,Founder of Hasidism,” Proceedings of the American Academy for Jewish Research 36 (1968): 57–83.

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reminiscent of similar changes in hasidic liturgy in the early eighteenth century.Russian Orthodox thinkers, discovers Turov, criticized the commonly practicedprayer. They sought to transform their believers by making their prayers permeateevery act of their daily lives and regarded prayers as an intentional, not a mechan-ical, experience. Turov points to striking affinities between these revivalist liturgi-cal innovations among Russian Orthodox thinkers and the revision of prayeramong Hasidim.

Departing from H. asidei dekokhvaya’ ideological concerns, Turov turns tosome institutional similarities between the Russian Orthodox startsy (elders)and the zaddikim. Both groups provided spiritual and physical healing andacted as intermediaries between God and their followers. As the Russian Orthodoxbelieved in the holiness of the startsy and came to them for blessings and magicalhealing, likewise, Jews felt awe before the zaddikim and flocked to their courts forspiritual and physical accommodation. The cults of the elders and the zaddikimcast a pietistic spell on the local population. The picture becomes particularlytempting for further research, as Turov garners proof from ethnographic studiesdiscussing how Christians resorted to Jewish zaddikim in cases of need. YetTurov’s knowledge of Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian cultures and hiscommand of Hebrew and Church Slavonic could have produced a much betteroutcome. The next step requires a thoroughly reconstructed socioculturalcontext, which would bring Turov’s highly productive yet purely theoreticalinsights down to earth. Then, perhaps, one would discover a paramount differencebetween the Russian Orthodox startsy and the hasidic masters: Unlike the latter,the former stayed in the countryside, cherished their asceticism, and did not drink.

LANDING HASIDISM POLAND AND RUSSIA

David Assaf once noticed that historical scholarship lacks a basic systematicsketch of the full historical, biographical, and chronological picture of Hasidism inPoland.21 Glenn Dynner made an ambitious attempt to fill this gap by tracing thespread of Hasidim in central Poland from the 1750s to the mid-nineteenth century.A follower of H. asidei de’ar‘a, Dynner has published what is most likely tobecome the standard book on a previously underresearched subject. His Men ofSilk is a meticulously documented revision of the received common sense regard-ing hasidic leadership as an antimercantile, anti-aristocratic and democraticallyoriented institution seeking to recruit followers among the needy, the poor, andthe uneducated. The opposite is the case, maintains Dynner. To challenge theromanticized historiography of hasidic masters, he traces their social functions,patterns of behavior, genealogical links, and economic ties. Using an impressivecorpus of hundreds of previously unexplored Polish archival documents,Dynner proves that the Polish hasidic leaders came from aristocratic families,recruited followers from among the rabbinic elite, and were the populists rather

21. David Assaf, “H. ạsidut be-folin ba-me’ah ha-19—maz.av ha-meh.kar u-sekirah bibliografit,”in Z. adikim ve-’anshei ma‘aseh: meh. karim be-h.asidut Polin, ed. Rachel Elior, Yisrael Bartal, and ChoneShmeruk (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1994), 357.

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than democratic leaders. Dynner applies to nineteenth-century Poland MosheRosman’s dispelling notions about zaddikim as social revolutionaries and their fol-lowers as demotic, small-town folk individuals.

The Polish context furnishes a productive discussion of the hasidic–mercantileelite links. In contrast to the suggestions of such antihasidic historians as HeinrichGraetz and Simon Dubnow, Dynner portrays the hasidic movement as a modernsocial phenomenon that bears resemblance to its medieval predecessors. Econ-omic and social context helps him dissipate the prevailing myth of mystical-minded hasidic masters detached from real life. On the contrary, the zaddikimenjoyed patronage and direct financial support from the rising Jewish bourgeoisie.Such industrial pioneers, future bankers, and army purveyors as the scions of theWolberg, Mandelsberg, Lipschutz, and Bergson families performed a remarkablerole in sponsoring the zaddikim of their choice. They employed hasidic mastersand their closest disciples in their commercial enterprises, defended hasidic com-mercial and religious interests before the state authorities, and had their childrenmarry the children of zaddikim. To compensate for these efforts, the zaddikiminterceded with the supreme celestial authority on behalf of their donors—a reci-procity that Dynner wittily calls “bask[ing] in divine glory by proxy.” Rejected asdespised parvenus and unable to earn prestige within the underemancipated Polishsociety, members of the Jewish financial elite could instead acquire social visi-bility by supporting the zaddikim.

Dynner’s contextualization makes obsolete yet another bit of receivedwisdom dominating the H. asidei dekokhvaya’ scholarship: that Hasidism was ademocratic and popular movement. As Dynner shows, hasidic masters emergedfrom the internecine elite conflict between the exclusive kabbalists and themore populist-oriented new Hasidim. The latter had an upper hand, empoweredthemselves, and created an entire hierarchy of communal posts under theircontrol. According to Dynner, Polish hasidic masters rested their prestige ontheir noble provenance, sought ties with the mercantile elites, and adopted royalbehavior. Thus, hasidic masters functioned as Jewish communal elites and weretreated as Jewish communal elites. Their often misunderstood populism rep-resented only one side of their elitist self-awareness.

The H. asidei de’ar‘a focus allows Dynner to look into the earthly pursuits ofthe zaddikim. In contrast to their brethren in Volhynia or Podol provinces, Polishhasidic masters demonstrated a greater degree of political activism. Rabbi Mena-chemMendel Schneersohn, summoned in the 1840s to contribute to the committeeon Jewish education and collaborate with the Ministry of People’s Education, wasan anomaly among the zaddikim in the Russian empire, who by and large werepolitically invisible. Yet Polish zaddikim were different, particularly in view ofthe late nineteenth-century activism of the Polish Orthodox camp and the creationof the Agudat Yisrael, the first political organization of Jewish religious tradition-alists.22 Dynner sees the activism of Polish zaddikim as responsible for the success

22. On this theme, see Gershon Bacon, The Politics of Tradition: Agudat Yisrael in Poland,1916–1939 (Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1996).

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and rapid spread of the movement. The hasidic leaders aggressively took ascetichasidim out of the elitist kloyz and brought them to communally oriented betmidrash (prayer houses) and eventually to the synagogue, into which theyimported the Lurianic liturgy. The process of making pious hasidim into new-style Hasidim constituted what scholars today call the hasidic movement.

The analytical approaches ofH. asidei de’ar‘a help demonstrate that Hasidimstrove to reconcile kabbalistic ideology with a pragmatic perception of reality.Dynner explains this unique hasidic nexus as placing the concept of ‘avodahbe-gashmiyut, worship through corporeality, at the center of hasidic praxis. Elabo-rated for the first time by Jacob Joseph from Polonnoe, this concept justified thehasidic metamorphosis from an elitist pietistic movement into a full-fledged socialundertaking. Moreover, if holiness was to be found in the material world, therewas nothing sinful in material bounty: Hasidic courts could thus adopt royal beha-vior. From this perspective, the activities of the communal institutions nowbecame part of the ‘avodah, the utmost level of Judaic worship deriving fromthe Jerusalem Temple service—something Dynner could have elaborated inmore depth and in a deeper diachronic perspective. By the same token, worshipthrough corporeality shaped the positive attitude of Polish Hasidim towardyikhus, usually understood as prestigious family status. In many cases, it was afamily lineage, and not just charisma, that generated the success and mass follow-ing of a hasidic leader. Ultimately, worship through corporeality informed individ-ual pursuits of Polish Hasidim, who were full-time merchants and professionalssuch as Simha Bunem, the head of Pszysucha’s court, a trained pharmacist, agrain and lumber merchant, a theatergoer, and perhaps even a gambler.

However attractive the intellectual understanding of hasidic ideology toexplain the spread of the movement, Dynner departs from the H. asidei dekokh-vaya’ focus on hasidic doctrines, suggests a reorientation along the lines ofsocial-historical inquiry, and advances a synthetic approach incorporatingH. asidei dekokhvaya’ patterns of thought into his thoroughly reestablished socialand cultural context of a stalwart h.asid de’ar‘a. Against the sociocultural back-drop, Dynner elaborates his ongoing sharp dispute with Marcin Wodziński, alsoa follower of the earth-bound H. asidei de’ar‘a, regarding the number ofHasidim in Poland. Unlike their colleagues in Russia and Galicia, the championsof Jewish enlightenment in Poland tolerated Hasidim because of their moderatebehavior, social concerns, and cultural openness, maintains Dynner, and notbecause of the quantitative insignificance of Hasidim in early nineteenth-centuryPoland, asWodziński has argued.Again, the context of the nineteenth-century demo-graphy and statistics helps Dynner explain why the available numbers, collected byWodziński, should not be taken for granted: He reminds us that women, more oftenthanmen, became attached to hasidicmasters, yet theywere systematically left out ofwhat the moderns might call a misogynistic official record.23

The Dynner–Wodziński controversy is a dispute between two H. asideide’ar‘a; as such, it hones their methodology, promises thought-provoking

23. Dynner, Men of Silk, 151–52, 158, 181–83.

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insights, and enhances the methodological sophistication of H. asidei de’ar‘a. Yetone should take into consideration that Wodziński’s contribution is not limited tothe quantitative aspect of hasidic population. In his volume Haskalah and Hasid-ism in the Kingdom of Poland: A History of Conflict, Wodziński looks into aheavily charged ideological realm—the clashes between the pious and the enligh-tened Hasidim and maskilim. Trying to overcome the bias of previous scholars—Raphael Mahler, among others—Wodziński suggests leaving the ideological andmoving into the social. His attention to the sociocultural, quantitative, and demo-graphic context makes him an asset among the younger generation of H. asideide’ar‘a, earth-bound Hasidim. The conflict between various groups of PolishJews, he argues, developed on a communal level; its participants were in dailycontact, and their immediate contacts framed their day-to-day social reality, theonly accurate context for understanding maskilim and Hasidim.

Though the Kingdom of Poland was legally part of Russia, and later, in the1830s, Nicholas I crowned himself as Polish ruler, Wodziński reminds us that thePolish situation was different than the Russian one. Poland functioned as a semi-independent entity; Nicholas I started to circumscribe the last vestiges of itsindependence only after 1830. Before that time, radical enlighteners were overre-presented in the Polish government. Long before Russia established its institute ofexpert Jews (uchenye evrei) to advise governors and ministers on Jewish issues,Polish authorities regularly employed enlightened Jews to design Jewishreforms, especially in education. The Polish government empowered maskilimduring the early stages of the movement, allowing them to publish their writings,dominate the dozory bóżnicze (new synagogue boards substituting for the kahal),manage social welfare institutions, establish an enlightened rabbinical school,institutionalize themselves as a social group, and eventually become financiallyindependent from Jewish society. Most importantly, argues Wodziński, Polishmaskilim sought and found a way to reform the community without radicalizingit. They focused on regenerating Jews into the “righteous and useful”; anti-talmu-dic assaults were peripheral in their program, and the most important representa-tives among them found no contradiction between traditional Jewish values andthe emerging Polish nationalism.

Accurate contextualization along the lines of H. asidei de’ar‘a methodologyfurnishes Wodziński’s important observations, as on the moderate, if not some-times positive, attitudes of Polish maskilim toward Hasidism. Unlike vociferousmitnagdim, who treated Hasidim as heretics as dangerous and as central to con-temporary sensibilities as the sabbateans were in the seventeenth century, Polishmaskilim perceived Hasidim as a peripheral and not entirely negative phenom-enon. Such early Polish enlighteners as Jacques Calmanson (1722–1811), thedoctor of King Stanislaw August, in his proposal on Jewish reforms, pitied thenaïve hasidic masses and criticized the swindling hasidic leadership. Unliketheir blatant antihasidic polemicists in Galicia, such as Josef Perl (1773–1839),Polish maskilim treated Hasidim as a curiosity, no more dangerous than other mys-tical sects. Whereas Abraham Jakub Stern, Polish enlightener, mathematician, andinventor, saw hasidic prayer houses as the epicenter of Jewish obscurantism andargued for their closure—something the Poles would not do—other Polish

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maskilim consistently emphasized the difference between moderate Polish hasidiczaddikim and those Galician charlatans across the border. Wodziński indicates thatsome harbingers of Polish enlightenment defended Hasidim as a “righteous, noble,and valuable, even if not flawless, religious movement” (146). Others emphasizedthat Hasidim did not deviate from the commandments of the Old Testament andcould not be treated as a harmful sect. Samuel Peltyn, the traditionally educatedself-made enlightened editor of the Polish-language Jewish newspaper Israelita,defended Hasidim for their faithfulness and reliability. Furthermore, a few ofthe Polish enlighteners regarded Kabbalah as an inherent element of Judaic tra-dition that resonated with many Jews.

Wodziński proves that Polish maskilim considered Hasidim a threat toenlightenment, not to Judaism. Testing a quantitative explanation, he maintainsthat Hasidim were not numerous in central Poland at the beginning of the nine-teenth century. Nor were they as central to the Polish Jewish community asother scholars, influenced by the contemporary polemical literature, used tothink. Wodziński neatly collects the data on Hasidim in a number of Polish pro-vinces and estimates the total to be as low as 3 percent and as high as 9 percentof the overall Jewish population, too insignificant to threaten maskilim, who didnot feel like waging war against the insignificant Hasidim.

In light of Dynner’s discussion of the “moderate” hasidic masters in centralPoland, Wodziński’s studies suggest a different interpretation. Unlike the blatantcritique of Hasidism among maskilim in Russia, there was no bitter fightamong maskilim against Hasidim in central Poland. Polish maskilim were moder-ate integrationists rather than radical reformers and had no reason to uproot mod-erate Polish Hasidim. The geographic context might also be telling: Whereas inRussia, Hasidim resided in the Pale of Settlement and most maskilim livedeither on its fringes (Vilna, Riga, Odessa) or in the capitals outside the Pale, inPoland, Hasidim lived side-by-side with maskilim in Lublin and Warsaw andwere neither privileged nor segregated. Ultimately, Wodziński’s and Dynner’sarguments agree perfectly in regard to the social involvement of Polish Hasidimand maskilim. Both scholars noticed that strong ties between Polish zaddikimand the emerging economic elite made them more open to nontraditionalsociety. Moreover, enlightened Polish Jews familiarized themselves much betterwith Hasidim than their Galician, Russian, and German brethren did. Therefore,Wodziński may well do without his low estimates of hasidic populations.

With the H. asidei de’ar‘a contextualization principle firm in hand, Ilia Lurieopens a discussion of a pivotal feature of Hasidim from White Russia’s provincesof the Pale of Settlement: their continuous quest for power. Menachem MendelSchneersohn, known as the Z. emah. Z. edek, is a protagonist in Lurie’s Hebrew-language volume The Chabad Movement in Czarist Russia 1828–1882, yetLurie is far from creating a scholarly biography of this much-acclaimed hasidicleader, the third rebbe of the Chabad movement. He is more interested in howthe Chabad court functioned rather than what it preached. Lurie uses both internalHebrew and external Russian documents to contextualize the structure, network,and functions of the hasidic court, resorting to methodological tools of culturalhistory (Peter Burke) and social anthropology (Victor Turner). Lurie’s

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methodology allows him to portray the Chabad movement as a complex phenom-enon with its own the center and periphery rather than as a homogeneous move-ment. Lurie introduces levels of hasidic culture, defining them as elite and popular,and conceptualizing the movement as an interaction between the two. His researchchallenges H. asidei dekokhvaya’, who, more often than not, are unable todifferentiate among the tiny hasidic ruling elite, the closest disciples of hasidicmasters—numbering in the dozens—and the masses—numbering in the thou-sands—portraying them indiscriminately as Hasidim. Lurie questions one of theimportant premises of the previous scholarship, asking to what extent the“masses” were familiar with the Chabad ideology, shared the knowledge ofthe Tanya (the founding book of the movement), and belonged to the adepts ofthe rebbe.

Not ideational realms or theology but earthly power and its distribution werethe driving mechanisms of the Chabad court, claims Lurie. Following DavidAssaf’s detailed reconstruction of the court of Israel of Ruzhin, Lurie meticulouslyexplores the relations between the rising Chabad court and the fading kahal. TheChabad leadership did not immediately replace the kahal. And the kahal did notcontinue to exist unchallenged, as one might think after reading Azriel Shokhat’sinfluential article,24 in the areas of Chabad control. Rather, the presence of twotypes of authority triggered a prolonged tension that eventually integrated thecourt and the communal authorities into a new type of power institution. Therebbe served as its legal authority, endorsed voluntary self-governinginstitutions, and imposed and collected communal tax to support the court. Healso provided an appealing mode of conduct for his immediate followers. Hedivided his territory to facilitate fund-raising and territorial control, chose hisrepresentatives from among the most knowledgeable, and made them responsiblefor Chabad-imposed tax collecting and preaching the rebbe’s gospel to the masses.The Chabad court was organized vertically and ideologically, yet it delegatedenough power to its representatives so that internal opposition to the leadercould never split the movement.

H. asidei de’ar‘a, Lurie among them, need to make a better use of the ideasof H. asidei dekokhvaya’. Lurie could have enriched his narrative with someH. asidei dekokhvaya’ concepts, particularly when he gives a “horizontal” spinto Arthur Green’s “vertical” conceptualization of the zaddik’s royal behavior.25

The Chabad rebbe, as the Seer of Lublin once put it, behaved as high priest.He donned his impeccable white clothes. He appeared before the masses onlyon certain occasions. His immediate followers created an aura of holinessaround him. He was the only conduit connecting devotees to the divine. Heestablished a double leadership: His sons, as if the imaginary kohanim le-hediotot(priests for regular folk), mediated between the people and the zaddik, amplify-ing the spiritual ecstasy of a visitor who was granted access to the master’s court.

24. Azriel Shokhat, “Hanhagah be-kehilot rusiayah ‘imbitul ha-kahal,”Z. iyon42 (1977): 143–233.25. Arthur Green, “Typologies of Leadership and the Hasidic Zaddiq,” in Jewish Spirituality,

from Sixteenth-Century Revival to the Present (New York: Crossroad, 1986–87), 127–56.

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As a temple-centered festivity, the zaddik’s presence in town boosted tradein Lubavich, enhanced turnover, and served as a spiritual endorsement, if onebelieves the maskilic evidence, to an enormous amount of Jewish contraband,legalized in the eyes of the Jews through donations to the zaddik’s court,which now turned into a simulacrum of the Eastern European, easily accessibleJerusalem Temple.

Lurie’s forte is his exteriorization of internal Chabad history, which he inte-grates and then challenges with the Russian-language nineteenth-century documen-tary evidence. Illuminating the relations of the Chabad rebbe with the Russiangovernment, Lurie radically alters two contradictory viewpoints: that MenachemMendel fought aggressively against governmental attempts to impose newJewish schooling (Michael Stanislawski) and that he passively resisted Russianeducational reform of the Jews (Isaac Levitats). Lurie offers an innovative, bold,and far-reaching explanation of the rebbe’s behavior. Menachem Mendel did hisbest to help establish new Jewish schools and urged the Jewish community toaccept the imposed governmental educational reforms. He acted this way notbecause he feared the government but because he strove to win the government’sbenevolence and sympathy in an ongoing fight between the Chabad and Russianenlighteners. Pinpointing his personal patriotic and progovernment stance, Mena-chemMendel pursued a twofold goal. He sought to demonstrate to the Russian offi-cials that the Orthodox camp could and should represent Russian Jewry before thegovernment, as it was more loyal than Russian maskilim. On the other hand, hetried to use his explicit support of the government reform as leverage to allowhim to control the teaching of Jewish religious subjects in state Jewish schools.Therefore, Menachem Mendel assisted the authorities in establishing a stateschool in Lubavich, sponsored the school, supervised the exams, and, moregenerally, worked hard to dissipate governmental antihasidic prejudice.

The study of Chabad-Lubavich Hasidism implies an intensive revision ofthe hagiographic sources of the movement. Among other things, Lurie comparesthe hagiographic narrative presented by Josef Isaac Schneersohn and the corre-sponding Russian archival evidence and concludes that the Chabad internal histor-iography reflects twentieth-century sensibilities.26 The hagiographic MenachemMendel Schneersohn, sketched by Josef Isaac, is better situated at the head ofthe semiclandestine Chabad in the Soviet Union, resisting the Bolsheviks’ athe-istic campaign, rather than in the Russian imperial context of NicholasI. Menachem Mendel’s activities, claims Lurie, had nothing to do with analleged attempt by the head of the movement to camouflage his clandestine sub-versive work. On the contrary, his was a far-reaching policy of an astute socialleader in charge of an undeclared civil campaign. The rebbe sought to createa positive impression of Chabad and Hasidim in the eyes of the Russian govern-ment, do away with the attempts of maskilim to denigrate the hasidic camp beforethe government, destroy the cooperation between the maskilim and the

26. See Joseph Isaac Schneersohn, The Tsemach Tzedek and the Haskalah Movement in Russia(Brooklyn, NY: Kehot, 1962).

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government, and eventually prove that the hasidic leadership deserved to be themost reliable representative of the Russian Jewry.

Like Wodziński and Dynner, Lurie underscores the pivotal role of the exter-nal Slavic-language evidence, against the backdrop of which internal Jewish textsand events start to make historical sense. Lurie’s contextualizing method once andagain turns upside-down both the hagiographic and critical scholarly treatment ofthe subject. His conclusions fit well with recent research into the struggle for lea-dership among the traditional and the enlightened camp in late imperial Russia. Itdemonstrates the advantages of the H. asidei de’ar‘a contextualization of internalhasidic history against the general cultural and societal backdrop, altering thereceived wisdom and opening up new patterns of thinking about Eastern Europeanhistoriography.

ACCOMMODATING THE STAR-STRUCK HASIDIM

Whereas most recent books on Hasidism deal with the main trends in themovement, David Assaf’s new Hebrew volume Caught in the Thicket coversthe abnormal, the unique, and the strange in hasidic history. The protagonists ofAssaf’s book are skeletons in the hasidic family closet. Some of them havebeen and still are considered so dangerous that hasidic collective memory hasbent itself backward to keep the door closed and to pretend that the closet isand has always been empty. Indeed, for the pietistic movement, which construesits history as an uplifting and instructive parable, it is too uncomfortable to copewith such events as the conversion of Moshe, son of Shneour Zalman of Liady, thesuicidal self-defenestration of the Seer of Lublin, or the barefaced physical vio-lence against Hạsidei Bratslav endorsed by Rabbi David Twersky, the zaddik ofTalnoe. Nor can the collective hasidic memory explain how Rabbi MenachemNahum Fridman, a relative of Israel Fridman (Yisroel Friedman), the holyzaddik of Ruzhin, could fall so low as to publish Hebrew books on comparativephilosophy, ethics, and aesthetics.

To accommodate the exceptional, Assaf places his protagonists in twoapparently irreconcilable contexts: collective memory and social history. Theintellectual nerve of Caught in the Thicket is the ongoing, century-long clashesbetween the latter and the former. Assaf provides a wealth of examples demon-strating how hasidic memory—as well as the collective memory of the Orthodoxcamp at large—tends to obliterate the uncommon and the unlikely. Grappling withthe obnoxious is tantamount in hasidic imagination to deviating from the righteouspath onto the slippery slope of religious doubts, leading to the abyss of self-destructive bitterness. The past should look holy and should be inhabited by right-eous Jewish leaders. Striving to protect the community, hasidic memory imposesits own canonical vision of the past and wipes out the apocryphal. The internalhistoriography of the hasidic movement stems from collective memory andcomes to cleanse it from the troublesome and the exclusive. It is exactly this trou-blesome and exclusive that is Assaf’s focus.

Assaf boldly turns the tables on the hasidic collective memory using the con-textualization preached by H. asidei de’ar‘a. He places the received hasidic

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wisdom on its head, challenging its ethical premises and demonstrating how thetraditional Jewish camp obsessed with its beatification fervor, twists, falsifies,and obliterates important moments of its own history. By doing so, Assaf opensup a vital question: how to critically reassess the internal historiography of theOrthodox Jewry, and how to write a critical history of the Jewish Orthodoxy.His answer is twofold. Above all, one needs to balance internal Jewish sourcesagainst one another—not only to emphasize contradictions but also to reconstructthe history of hasidic memory. Authors of hasidic hagiographies might present anentirely false narrative of their past, but the two-hundred-year-long story of theirdeception is a history that is worth studying. Then—and here Assaf joins otherH. asidei de’ar‘a—one needs to appraise the internal against the backdrop of theexternal evidence, in this case, Russian or Polish social history. In some cases—but not in all—Assaf introduces Russian- and even Ukrainian-language evi-dence: The chapters in which he does so (on R. Moshe Schneersohn’s conversionand on the persecutions of H. asidei Bratslav) are the best in his book. In them,Assaf uses newly uncovered archival sources, “external” testimonies (written byconverts), maskilic writings and memoirs, and internal hasidic sources. The chap-ters based on comparative discussion of Hebrew and Russian sources stronglysuggest that one cannot write a serious history of Hasidism without engagingEastern European sociocultural context—and Slavic-language evidence furnishesamazing discoveries.

Assaf’s reconstruction of the conversion of Rabbi Moshe ben ShneourZalman, the son of the founder of Chabad-Lubavich Hasidism, is a goodexample of how his methodology works. Meticulous social history comes first.Moshe Schneersohn was born about 1784 and became known among his familymembers as a strange child. The family spent significant sums on his doctors,was aware of his weird behavior, yet honored him with family privileges on parwith his brothers. R. Moshe married Shifra, the daughter of Tsevi Hirsh of Ule, asmall town in Vitebsk Province. In 1812, when Napoleon’s troops movedthrough Belorussia toward Moscow, R. Moshe ran away to Shklov, where hewas imprisoned by the French and condemned to death for spying. He was soonreleased, however, as the French realized that the alleged spy was mentally chal-lenged. Most likely this dramatic experience intensified R. Moshe’s mentalillness. Monies raised for him by his brothers passed to his wife, probably forhis extensive medical needs. In Ule, R. Moshe befriended Russian lieutenantcolonel Puzanov and, apparently under his influence, chose to convert toChristianity. Most likely he converted twice, first to Catholicism and later toRussian Orthodoxy. As a Christian neophyte, he found himself under the protectionof the Russian church; prominent church hierarchs taught him the basics of RussianOrthodoxy. Notwithstanding his conversion, his brothers wanted him back home,arguing that he was mentally ill and that his conversion was null and void. YetAlexander I looked into the matter and forbade sending R. Moshe back home.R. Moshe died in the Obukhovskaia hospital in St. Petersburg, where Ivan Orlai,a Russian medical celebrity, advised sending him for tests and treatment.

Assaf challenges the evidence on which H. asidei dekokhvaya’ historiansused to rely, demonstrating how various groups with a vested interest in this

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story used it for propaganda purposes. Some maskilim engaged R. Moshe’s per-sonal tragedy to poke fun at hasidim who might have been as crazy and insaneas R. Moshe. Mitnagdim spread rumors that he drowned: the one who convertedthrough baptismal waters should be punished by waters, they implied. Jewish con-verts to Christianity argued that R. Moshe was in good health and did what everyJew should do. R. Moshe’s family was reticent on the issue: Seeking oblivion, theypreferred to move to the Land of Israel. But Chabad advanced a counter-history,attempting to glorify R. Moshe’s memory and make the unfortunate rebbe’s soninto a martyr. Josef Isaac Schneersohn invented a story recalling the 1263 disputa-tion in Barcelona and having nothing to do with Russian realities. He maintainedthat Alexander I, known for his mystical proclivities, organized a disputationbetween Christians and Jews (in fact, imperial Russia knows nothing of thesort). R. Moshe was forced to participate, and when, after his victory, the Synodordered the disputation be moved from one town in the interior Russia toanother, he ran away, went into hiding and died in Radomysl. Indeed, the docu-ments that Shaul Stampfer found in the Minsk archive and shared with DavidAssaf made all those versions obsolete.

Assaf returns any ideological take on the story to its source—to the realm ofimagination, ideas, and agendas, showing that H. asidei dekokhvaya’ methodologyfails to grasp the empirical reality and constitutes reality on its own. His approachis equidistant from both the cynical mockery of maskilim and the outward falsifi-cation of Hasidim. One can hardly learn a lot about Hasidism from the drama ofR. Moshe; but one can learn a lot from the ways in which various contemporarygroups dealt with the abnormal and the strange. Thus, Assaf underscores thenecessity for a historian of Hasidism to constantly and consistently movebeyond the H. asidei dekokhvaya’ context.

HASIDIC STUDIES BETWEEN HEAVEN AND EARTH

The modern historiography of Hasidism is split into two opposing groups,star-struck and earth-bound Hasidim, H. asidei dekokhvaya’ and H. asidei de’ar‘a,respectively, of which the former are more interested in Hasidism, the movement,and the latter in Hasidim, the people. Discussing the ideational aspect of Hasidism,H. asidei dekokhvaya’ have left no stones unturned. They have produced sophisti-cated research into the hasidic primary sources, such as homilies, hagiographies,letters, and memoirs. They have introduced productive intellectual patterns that areindispensable for the explanation of hasidic engagement with traditional Jewishsources, biblical or rabbinic. Yet quite often, they refuse to acknowledge thatthe sources with which they work contain thick literary layers, that they are inmost cases thoroughly edited, that they reflect the contemporary agendas and con-cerns of the editor and the printer and their corresponding audience, and that theymanifest the attitudes of the narrator to his narrative. All these concerns do notchange the perception among H. asidei dekokhvaya’ of the trustworthiness oftheir primary sources. They disagree that hagiographies are much later reflectionscompiled by a not at all disinterested editor with an eye on the agenda of his con-temporary audience. The notion of “hierarchy,” whimsically banished from

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American campuses, is ostracized from H. asidei dekokhvaya’ research, too. Allsources are important; circumstances shaping and differentiating them—or theirgenre—are not.

For H. asidei dekokhvaya’, Hasidism as a stage in the evolution of Judaism ismore significant than Hasidim as people among other Jews. H. asidei dekokhvaya’claim interest in a social perspective, yet they reconstruct the social context ofHasidism through sources that fit the study of the history of ideas. What haslong been assessed in modern humanities as “literature” they still consider“history.” They are efficient at treating Hasidism within the context of Jewish mys-ticism. Yet they need to better engage the social, cultural, comparative religion,and perhaps ethnographic context to explain the specificity of Hasidism as aPolish, Eastern European, or early modern European phenomenon. While theyemphasize some overarching aspects of Hasidism such as messianism, they failto explain the differences and specificities of, say, Josef Karo’s messianism andthat of Yehile Mikhel of Zolochev. Their Besht is not entrenched in any grassrootsreality. He could emerge in seventeenth-century Salonika, eighteenth-centuryPodolia, nineteenth-century Bobruisk, or twentieth-century Monsey. H. asideidekokhvaya’ readily refer to Międzybóż or Kuty, yet the Besht for them is aheaven-dweller who transcended his earthly reality. What they find importantabout him is his alleged revolutionary role in the making of Hasidism, not whathe was for the town-dwellers of the 1750s in the Polish private town ofMiędzybóż.

H. asidei dekokhvaya’ have increasingly taken what Hasidim thought forwhat they did. As the perspective ofH. asidei dekokhvaya’ underscores continuitiesabove all, unconnected social events become one. The mid-seventeenth-centuryCossack revolution known in Jewish historiography as gezerot tah. ve-tat (the Cat-astrophe of 1648–49), the late seventeenth-century aftermath of the sabbateanschism, the blood libel cases of the 1740s, and the Haidamaks rebellions of the1760s—H. asidei dekokhvaya’ glue these events onto a historical continuity theycall the “crisis.” Benjamin Nathans has usefully observed that the notion ofcrisis has become as important and as meaningless for the study of Eastern Euro-pean Jewry as the concept of the rise of the middle class for the study of earlymodern Britain.27 Yet H. asidei dekokhvaya’ are comfortable with grand historicalnarratives: Hasidism for them was and still is a movement emerging as a responseto the religious, communal, and political crises in eastern Poland. The question,indeed, is not whether there was or was not a crisis in eighteenth-centuryPoland but whether we should use the notion of “crisis” to portray Eastern Euro-pean Jewry over three centuries.

H. asidei de’ar‘a are also not without flaws, yet they solve their methodologi-cal shortcomings by widening the concentric contexts in which they discussHasidism. They are quite efficient when it comes to the discussion of whatHasidim were doing, but they need to find better ways to incorporate what

27. Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia(Berkeley: California University Press, 2003), 8.

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Hasidim were thinking—using the experience of H. asidei dekokhvaya’. Some ofH. asidei de’ar‘a reject internal hasidic historiography as unreliable, whereasothers strive to integrate collective memory, which reflects how Hasidimwanted to be seen and how this outlook diverges from how one should see theHasidim. H. asidei de’ar‘a increasingly rely on outside sources as much moreobjective evidence than the internal Jewish. They seem to realize that, comparedto Jewish witnesses, Polish or Russian authorities acted as relatively disinterestedobservers. They provide historians with newly uncovered sources, enabling themto recreate an accurate context for the hasidic movement by looking at the corre-sponding shtetls in which hasidic masters resided. Yet H. asidei de’ar‘a are muchless efficient when they need to discuss what Hasidim were thinking. Some ofthem, but not all, do not seem to have any positive way of treating the vastcorpus of hagiographic sources; they reject most of it as unreliable. Apparently,H. asidei de’ar‘a do not have a response to the question of what to do withhasidic figures for whom we have only tales or other fictitious narratives. Thereis hardly any doubt that H. aye Moharan is a hagiography par excellence composedby one of the loyal adepts of Rabbi Nachman. Should we dismiss it as a sourcecovering the life of Rabbi Nachman because we do not have any external evidencefor the corresponding episodes of his life?

In his review of Assaf’s book on Rabbi Israel of Ruzhin, Yosef Dan men-tioned that the Scholem school discusses Hasidism through relations betweenman and God, whereas historians of the Dinur school look into the worldlymatters.28 In fact, the border separating these two trends is more subtle than theone separating social history from the history of thought and the disciples ofScholem from the disciples of Dinur. Two key scholars who, to my mind, representthe clashing groupings, Moshe Rosman and Immanuel Etkes, are both social his-torians, and yet Rosman’s work is the epitome of the methodology of H. asideide’ar‘a, whereas Etkes’s scholarship is firmly embedded in the methodologicalsetting of H. asidei dekokhvaya’. If one compares David Assaf’s dissertation tohis book The Regal Way, on Israel of Ruzhin, and the latter to his Caught in theThicket, one would discover his consistently growing concern for the method-ology, sources, and themes of H. asidei de’ar‘a. Glenn Dynner’s Men of Silkreflects the author’s intent to critically reassess the methodology of H. asideide’ar‘a without leaving its realm. Marcin Wodziński’s Haskalah and Hasidismand Ilia Lurie’s ‘Edah u-medinah demonstrate the strong desire of their authorsto become stalwart H. asidei de’ar‘a. Igor Turov’s most interesting insights leadhim from the heights of H. asidei dekokhvaya’ into the depths of H. asidei de’ar‘aSlavic contextualization. Like most H. asidei dekokhvaya’, Zeev Gries workswith the published Jewish sources, but he approaches them through H. asideide’ar‘a methodology. It is particularly amazing that the questions that H. asideide’ar‘a ask are shaped predominantly by H. asidei dekokhvaya’. Furthermore,some H. asidei de’ar‘a were trained (and tolerated) by H. asidei dekokhvaya’,

28. Yosef Dan, “R. Yisrael mi-Ruzhin: beyn zִaddik ha-dor le-zִaddick ha-’emet,” Mada’ei ha-yahadut 37 (1997): 297–308, esp. 301.

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which makes one think of H. asidei de’ar‘a not only as a school or grouping butalso as a stage in the study of Hasidism.

H. asidei de’ar‘a have already proved that an accurate sociocultural recon-struction is the only way to conduct a serious study of the hasidic movement.To intelligently discuss eighteenth-century Hasidism, one needs to look at Międ-zybóż, Szpola, and Międzyrzecz and analyze the nineteenth-century movement insuch towns as Ruzhin, Talnoe, Makarov, and Sadagora. The better one knows theconcrete realities of a shtetl, the better one is able to embed the hasidic masters offlesh and blood in their social setting and understand who they were. Now H. asideide’ar‘a might want to use a major source of their opponents—internal Jewishsources, (e.g., hagiographies)—and demonstrate to what extent hagiographieswere prescriptive, not descriptive sources, illuminating what to believe in ratherthan portraying life as it was. At the same time, H. asidei dekokhvaya’ shouldbalance their insights into the ideational with an accurate contextualization oftheir sources. Among other things, they should place hagiographies in thecontext of the time and place in which they were produced and prove that theyare historical—but their historicity is different: They accurately reflect the timeperiod in which they saw light, not which they portrayed; they reflect theagenda of the people or groups that produced them, and not the people orgroups they claimed to genuinely represent. Ultimately, the representatives ofboth trends should seek new ways to bring together hasidic theology andhasidic society.

As a person with a vested interest in the hasidic scholarship, I think that thesynthesis of what Hasidim thought and what they did is more likely to be achievedwithin the H. asidei de’ar‘a methodology. But earth-bound Hasidim should notrush to celebrate their triumph. Instead, they should move further away fromsocial into cultural history, hone their methodological tools, and redefine whatthey understand as an accurate context. This becomes more important asmodern humanities deepen and widen what one may call the socioculturalcontext. If modern social historians do not find ways to sharpen their contextua-lization tools, in a half century, today’s H. asidei de’ar‘amight very well find them-selves among yesterday’s H. asidei dekokhvaya’.

Yohanan Petrovsky-ShternNorthwestern University,

Evanston, Illinois

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